I Love Christmas So Much I'm Glad There Are Two Of Them
The double joy of a particularly Christian, and a distinctly American, holiday
I have another Christmas piece at The Bulwark, which ran on Christmas Eve. (Here’s my first one, on Amazon’s original Christmas songs, and my follow-up here).
This second one is the more important of the two, and in it I articulate a thought I’ve had for awhile about the whole question of the commercialization and secularization of Christmas. (I kind of started working on this actual piece after a brief Note on Substack on the topic took off—it’s cool to use social media as a kind of testing ground for essay ideas.)
I think of there as being two Christmases: the Christian celebration of the birth of Christ, and the American civic and commercial holiday about snow/winter/gifts/family/food/etc., which also happens to be called Christmas. I see no reason, in other words, why these should be seen as competing with each other, or why the celebration of Christmas and its meaning should be zero-sum:
As a Catholic, I observe Advent. I try to remember that quiet, expectant, even spooky idea, that unsettling thought that God walked on this earth.
But also, I must confess, I love the American secular Christmas. I love the Christmas songs on the radio for a month or more, the giant, tacky displays of artificial trees in every height and color in the stores, the inflatables ranging from Snoopy to Star Wars contraptions in the front yards, the dorky commercials rewriting carols and seasonal tunes with lyrics about going crazy while shopping. I love Frosty and Rudolph, the observation that “it’s a marshmallow world” when it snows, the general brightening up and enlivening of the winter.
And for anybody with even an ounce of sentimentality or nostalgia—which is most of us—even some of the quasi-commercial traditions can end up meaning something. The discount artificial tree from fifteen years ago that my father restrung after the cats gnawed the original lights; the Christmas village houses my wife and I buy, one after Christmas every year to look forward to displaying the next; archaeological layers of decorations and ornaments my parents accumulated over the decades, that function as receptacles for memories, a sort of mental map of my childhood condensed to a few boxes.
None of this takes away from the “reason for the season.” Why should it? Why can a human heart, and our nation, not be big enough for all of it?
And, you can’t really talk about this question without addressing the old notion that American Jews secularized Christmas. There are more and less nasty ways of putting this, but it’s an antisemitic idea, not only because it blames “the Jews" for something, but because it rejects pluralism and assumes that there can only be one thing called Christmas:
There is an even nastier version of this critique, one still mostly confined to the seedier corners of the internet, although it perhaps informs some of this: that America’s secular Christmas is a Jewish invention, one part crass commercialism and one part an actual attack on Jesus Christ.
But this is not just antisemitic; it is a rejection of pluralism, and a rejection of something distinctly American….
What kind of cheerless bigot—if you look a little bit, you will find them—can hear the iconic sounds of the Phil Spector Christmas album and think “a Jewish producer using black artists to sing secular songs to attack Christmas” instead of enjoying the music? (In fact, that album does end with “Silent Night,” which is mostly instrumental but with the final words sung, making them the final words on the album itself: “Holy infant so tender and mild / sleep in heavenly peace.”)
When I look at the long list of secular Christmas classics that were written by Jews, I don’t see a non-Christian group diluting “my” holiday. I see the story of a different group of people finding a way to assimilate into the sort of generically Christian American mainstream culture, while contributing to it in a particular way. There’s something almost aching and beautiful about it, really, how so many different things—commercialism, Chinese food on Christmas (solidarity between two ethnic groups who didn’t share the majority religion), Santa Claus drinking Coke, the sort of genericized Christian message of good will and charity—it makes me proud to be an American. It is a part of our shared culture. America’s secular Christmas is a shining example of the melting pot. Out of many, one.
On the question of Christmas being too commercialized, I’m more sympathetic to the critics. You can be secular without being overly commercialized. But as I get older, I appreciate the excess more, in some way. It seems like so little extra consumption in the long run, in exchange for memories that really matter much more than the stuff. Maybe all the junky plastic toys are junk, but you remember that excitement forever, and you can’t channel it without the stuff.
And again, I wouldn’t say that we’ve commercialized the Christian Christmas, as much as fashioned an American commercial celebration out of the occasion. It gives businesses a strong end to the year; it makes some of the finest memories children have; it fits with America’s enterprising commercial culture.
I love every Christmas. Merry Christmas!
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